Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Rymix writes "I have been working with a new internet-friend of mine to produce an open source gesture recording and recognition engine for Kinect SDK. It's based on the Dynamic Time Warping technique and allows developers to record their own gestures and reliably recognise them. It's currently 2D but 3D is an easy development, coming soon. We're looking for community take-up and contribution to this project — it could help a lot of people with rapid prototyping and could even be used in production solutions (within the Kinect SDK's terms of use, of course!)."

In all seriousness, why all the stories about the Kinect? I don't play videogames, so that aspect doesn't interest me. Getting it to do stuff it wasn't made to do is a cool hack, and I can appreciate that. I can picture some important applications for the disabled, I guess. Is there anything more to it than that? Am I missing something?

Every single time there's a Kinect story, someone has to ask this question. My cynical side wonders whether they'd still be doing this if the Kinect wasn't a Microsoft product, but here's [slashdot.org] a comment I posted a while back that explains why, even though it may be overrhyped as a video game peripheral, the Kinect is damned cool for robotics applications. The robotics community has, almost overnight, dropped work on many other kinds of input sensors to focus on the Kinect because it's so much more useful (see openni_kinect on ROS [ros.org] for the primary driver, although we'll see if this continues to see love now that an official SDK is out).

Mod parent up, please. I'm getting sick of the flurry of "you made something with your own two hands? color me unimpressed" type comments on Slashdot anytime there's a story about kinect hacking or other Maker type stuff. I got into this field because I liked to break/take apart/repurpose stuff as a kid, and these experiments satisfy that urge today. Not everyone comes to this site to bitch about video drivers or start OS platform flame wars./end rant.

Good point. We should have all the people currently hacking on the Kinect or using the SDK to just stop all work and abandon it all because PCM2 can't see any important applications for the hardware. With such definitive evidence on the uselessness of the Kinect, this SDK or any apps currently written or being worked on, I can't see how any could argue against these conclusions.

Good point. We should have all the people currently hacking on the Kinect or using the SDK to just stop all work and abandon it all because PCM2 can't see any important applications for the hardware. With such definitive evidence on the uselessness of the Kinect, this SDK or any apps currently written or being worked on, I can't see how any could argue against these conclusions.

My God, you have read my mind! You should find some scientists, I'm sure there is important research to be done on your uncanny abilities.

There are several reasons for this study:
1) It's a component of an academic study into the effects of 'natural' human-computer interaction on learning and teaching. There sure is a lot of buzz about Kinect at the moment, so studies like this will help to prove just how useful gesture controls could really be. Or not. Open mind...
2) Dynamic Time Warping is a viable but relatively under-explored method for vector-based gesture recording and recognition. It's interesting to see how well this can perform ag

And my feedback. The Kinect is a potentially great piece of hardware but...Being protected from a potentially eyeblinding 60 mW infrared laser, with only crackable, diffraction gratings to disperse the beam across the room is a bit too risky for me.